"Deltagen is very pleased with the work flowing from our collaboration with Stanford, and we commend the scientists involved in this study on their work to further elucidate the role of melanopsin in the sleep cycle," said Mark Moore, chief scientific officer of Deltagen Inc. "We believe that our company's high throughput gene knockout approach, coupled with our comprehensive systems biology analysis program, will continue to be instrumental in leading researchers to gene function - and ultimately to new pharmaceutical targets and drug candidates."

While the Science study confirms that melanopsin can transmit information to the circadian clock, future studies will focus on identifying the relative contributions of other molecules to circadian clock maintenance, Ruby and O'Hara noted.

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Contact: Mark Shwartz
mshwartz@stanford.edu
650-723-9296
Stanford University
12-Dec-2002